Rudolf Slánský: architect of Communist takeover and purge victim

Czechoslovak top Communist Rudolf Slánský is a tragic figure of 20th
century history in the classical sense of the word. In the end the fate of
the once powerful and self made man was mapped out elsewhere as he became a
victim of the state security system he helped create.

Slánský rose to the top of the Czechoslovak Communist party and played a
key part in its seizure of power in February 1948. For some periods before
and after the takeover he was probably more important than party leader
Klement Gottwald who was increasingly hitting the bottle for alcoholic
consolation.

But at the height of the power Slánský was toppled by Soviet leader
Josef Stalin’s paranoid search for scapegoats and purge victims. The
repressive state machinery which Slánský had helped put in place in
Communist Czechoslovakia was turned against one of its creators.

After a week long show trial, the former all-powerful party secretary was
hanged.. That ironical twist and Slánský’s cold and calculating
personality have resulted in not many tears being shed about his fate in
the following years.

Historians have already pieced together the story of the Slánský’s
show trial – the most shocking event to hit the Communist Party in power
up till then. Some say the party never really recovered from the revelation
that such a trusted and top placed party member could have been a
conspirator for the Imperialist, Titoist and Zionist enemies of the time.

J. V. Stalin and Klement Gottwald
But in spite of the recent historical spadework, many questions still
remain. Why, for example, was Slánský in particular picked out for
sacrifice after such an exemplary record serving the party?

Igor Lukeš is a professor of international relations and history at Boston
University who has researched and written about Slánský’s trial and
execution.

“The fact that Slánský was chosen has really no satisfactory
explanation. He was of course a completely devoted Stalinist from his
earliest moments in politics. From the early 1920’s when the party came
into existence he was eager and willing to emulate the line that came from
Moscow”

He thinks that Stalin’s clear belief in the Machiavellian principle that
a prince should be feared rather than loved probably played a big part in
deciding Slánský’s fate:

“It in fact seems to me that Slánský may have been chosen precisely
because he was so loyal to Stalin. Because in killing him Stalin’s
message to the rest of the East European leadership was that if he can die
– if he is not safe – then nobody is. Perhaps the main motivation
behind this and other similar show trials that swept across Eastern Europe
was to terrorise East Europe’s Communist bosses into absolute and total
submission.”

Rudolf Slánský was born in the village of Nezvěstice, south of Pilsen,
in 1901. His elder brother Josef lent him Marxist books and he is reported
to have taken part in his first political demonstration - against the
Austrian Empire – aged 17. A talented student, he moved to the capital
Prague to continue his studies but in the turbulent years following the
creation of the new Czechoslovakia and evolving Russian revolution was
increasingly sidetracked by politics.

As a 20-year-old in 1921 he was one of the founder members of the
Communist Party. From 1924 he was a journalist on party papers, getting his
proletarian baptism in the coal and steel city of Ostrava where he became
party regional secretary. It was also in Ostrava that his friendship
developed with future party leader Klement Gottwald. When Gottwald seized
power from the party old guard in 1929 Slánský was also one of the main
beneficiaries. He was appointed to the new central committee and
politbureau and became party secretary for Prague.

But it was not all smooth sailing. The Communist Party was banned at the
time and Slánský’s attempts to build up its underground network got him
in trouble more than once with Moscow. In 1935 he was banished from the top
party echelons for not promoting a strong enough common front against
Fascism. He took the criticism badly but was back at the top a year later.
In the aftermath of Munich in 1938, Slánský – like the other
Czechoslovak party leaders – fled to Moscow.

Like other exiles, Slánský and his family were housed in the famous
Hotel Lux – where Stalin’s secret police made nightly selections of who
would be purged. Historian Igor Lukeš:

“The NKVD arrested on a daily – or rather nightly – basis. And the
people who lived there – this has been well attested to by many
participants – essentially could not sleep throughout the night because
you could hear the arresting teams spreading throughout the building. All
you could really do was just to listen to the steps whether they would stop
in front of your door or whether that very night they would stop at
somebody else’s door. I think these people went through absolute
horror.”

The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union was a relief for the Czech Communist
exiles because it curbed the purges. But Slánský faced further personal
tragedy. His six-month old daughter disappeared in Moscow just before
Christmas in 1943 never to be seen again. Whether it was a political act,
the work of a deranged woman, or cannibals is not clear. Gottwald is
reportedly said to have told Slánský at one stage afterwards to stop
grieving for his daughter and make another one.

After taking part in the Slovak National Uprising in mid-1944 and a
gruelling escape across the mountains to evade the Nazis - during which
fellow party leader Jan Šverma died – Slánský returned to
Czechoslavakia on the heels of the victorious Red Army.

The party was riding a popular wave and Slánský was at the top of that
wave as the second most powerful man after Gottwald. Slánský’s task as
party general secretary was to build the party at home. As its membership
soared and influence developed, so did that of the general secretary. He
picked most of the regional party leaders himself and became a central
figure as it prepared to infiltrate and sobotage democratic parties and
make a bid for power.

In the run-up to February 1948 Slánský’s managerial and organisational
genius and Gottwald’s sporadic failure to manage his alcoholism meant he
was at the zenith of his power. Igor Lukeš:

Rudolf Slánský and Klement Gottwald (right) in 1948, photo: CTK“Perhaps in the period 1945-1948, he may have been on occasion perhaps
even more important than Gottwald himself – who became more and more
dependent on alcohol and at times became nothing more than a simple drunk.
It was therefore up to Slánský to prepare the party for the final
confrontation with its democratic rivals. And it was Slánský who I think
proved more than once in the period between 1945-1948 that he was a
brilliant – if I can put that in quotation marks – “a brilliant
tactician,” says Lukeš.

Once in power, the party increasing sought to have its say in running the
country. Over time this put it on a collision course with the new Communist
ministers in government and made the normally friendless Slánský even
more enemies. He still however had his trump card – his close friendship
with Gottwald. Gottwald’s elevation to the presidency pushed more power
Slánský’s way. But there were clouds on the horizon. He began to be
overshadowed by the young new rising star, Alexej Čepička, who was to
marry Gottwald’s daughter.

The real threat however came from Moscow and Stalin’s real or artificial
conviction that the new Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe
were being undermined from within by top party officials. The first
attempts to weed out a conspiracy at first cast Slánský – together with
Gottwald - as a victim. But during the early months of 1951 his role began
to be redrafted by the imported Soviet investigators as the mastermind of
an anti-state conspiracy.

“If you actually look at the period of the last year and a half of
Slánský’s life you discover that there was more than one occasion where
Stalin demanded harsh measures be applied against Slánský - and he
demanded it of Gottwald. I think that if there is one episode in this story
it is how long Gottwald surprisingly resisted the pressure from Moscow for
Slánský’s arrest and his demise and destruction,” Lukeš adds.

The pressure building up for that arrest probably became irresistible when
a letter implicating Slánský as a Western agent – or the so-called
great sweeper – was intercepted. It was a plant by an agent working for
exiled Czechoslovak anti-Communist intelligence chief František Moravec.
The arrest followed two weeks later after Slánský returned to his Prague
villa from a reception. The process then began of moulding Slánský’s
testimony for the show trial that was being prepared. Here, unlike many of
his colleagues he resisted for a long time and narrowly failed to take his
own life in prison. Mr Lukeš again:

“He in fact behaved in a rather courageous way. He confessed to things
that had only been confessed to already by his colleagues and he tried as
hard as he could not implicate unnecessarily others.”

But as Slánský probably knew from the Soviet purges and the ones which
he had helped organise at home against generals, politicians and priests
seen as threats to the Communist regime – there was no real possibility
of changing the script and end that had been planned in advance. The trial
sparked a wave of anti-Jewish hatred – Slánský and most of his alleged
fellow conspirators were Jewish. He was hanged on December 3, 1952, at
Prague’s Pankrác prison.